It's time for the technology industries to celebrate Mother's Day.
Like anything worth celebrating, the influence of mothers in the tech industry is contradictory. If you work for Ericsson, for example, just being of prime parenthood age can get you a buyout offer. The company recently offered 1,000 of its Swedish employees between the ages of 35 and 50 a voluntary buy out. They hope to replace those expensive, long term employees with 900 workers under the age of 30. The move flies in the face of study results that concluded that becoming a mother makes women more focused, effective, efficient and productive at work. (see Giving Birth to Supermom.)
Does aging make technology workers less flexible? Less able to adapt to innovations in our fields? Does it make us less productive?
The older generation seems to have adapted. For every anecdote from programmers who are their parents' personal telephone tech support, there is a story of a mother who overcame technophobia to become more productive both at work and at home.
I remember my own mother's reaction to a mid-1980s offer in the Canadian Tire Christmas catalogue. "Why on earth would I want a free mouse with my computer?!" she said.
Twenty years later my mother is, perhaps surprisingly, the opposite of technologically inept. She shares URLs with her classes, customizes settings, she uses computerized report-card systems with ease and accepts or rejects substitute teaching jobs over a telephone-operated scheduling system. Clearly she no longer believes that every mouse has four legs and a long tail.
Ilse Schafer, mother of Tucows marketing vice-president Ken Schafer, was determined to prove herself as an adaptable career woman. More than 20 years ago, Ilse delayed her retirement so that she could undergo training on the new computer system being installed at the University library where she worked.
"She wanted to show that she could do it and as soon as she'd finished training and could do it — she retired, triumphant," Ken Schafer remembers.
Upon retirement though, technical innovations were the last thing on Ilse's mind. Ken doubts that his mother even understood what he has done for a living for the past 12 years. Her former triumph was to return, though. Ilse conquered her fears of unknown technology when she realized it was the only way to remain connected to her children and 10 and 12 year-old grandchildren. For Christmas 2004 the Schafer family set Ilse up with a hand-me-down computer and high speed access. She's been on-line several times a day ever since. Not bad for an 84 year-old.
And then, there are the mothers who used technology to launch an entirely new career. Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei, author of the blog www.GeneticsandHealth.com, cites her mother as her science and technology guru. Kuei-Yu Lei, 59, started community college classes in programming in PASCAL and FORTRAN at the age of 38 and began her career working for a software start up 10 years ago. Still employed in the industry, the elder Lei's skills are useful in the domestic setting as well. She has taught her daughter how to hook up all the computers in the house so that the family can communicate wirelessly. She also reconfigured an old laptop for her three year-old grandson to play computer games on.
"I'm not only proud of her as a capable mother and an intelligent woman, I'm also grateful she taught me how to figure things out either by learning about it systematically in school or by trial and error," says Hsien-Hsien of Kuei-Yu. "That's what being tech savvy is all about — being willing to take risks and try something that other people don't think will work."
One can only hope that Ericsson, and other companies who seek out cheaper, younger workers, won't regret losing the flexibility and adaptability older generations obviously bring to the job.
